# tex -> png

I would like to use Matplotlib for automatically generating

> reports in HTML. I would like to do this without having to
> use latex first and the convert from there (it would be much
> faster to make my own HTML directly and I don't need lots of
> complicated features yet). Has anyone already done this who
> is willing to share code with me?

> One thing I need to do that would make this work really well
> is to generate little PNG's of symbols and formulas to use
> in line with text in the HTML (sort of how LaTeX2HTML
> handles using $\theta$ in line. Is there a way to use the
> TeX rendering system used on figures to make little PNG's
> with just TeX expressions on them (i.e. theta.png)?

TeX/LaTeX plus dvipng is really the right way to solve this problem.
Coincidentally, I have been working to incorporate tex into
backend_agg via dvipng (and into backend_ps via psfrag) and matplotlib
has a tex manager class

So if you don't mind installing tex and dvipng (on my Ubuntu system is
is simply

> sudo apt-get install dvipng

then you can use the matplotlib texmanager class to handle the system
calls, cacheing results it's seen before and so on

>>> from matplotlib.texmanager import TexManager
>>> m = TexManager()
>>> pngfile = m.make_png("\TeX\ is Number $e^{-i\pi}$!", dpi=100)
>>> print pngfile
/home/jdhunter/.tex.cache/5b723d2ea8d0f15af94ec585aece1582_100.png

You need to make sure you have texmanager revision 1.2 from CVS (or
later).

Of course if you are on a platform where TeX is not easily installed,
this won't help much. In that case, you can use matplotlib to create
the math images for you, but I would use the mathtext parser directly
rather than the whole figure / axes api.

Let me know if you still want/need to use mpl for this and I'll give
you some pointers.

JDH

Thanks again John. The newest texmanager.py worked great.

John Hunter wrote:

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